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Launch HN: Terminal Use (YC W26) – Vercel for filesystem-based agents

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Re: Launch HN: Terminal Use (YC W26) – Vercel for filesystem-based agents

#21

Post by webpolis »

alexchantavy wrote: post #12
verdverm wrote: post #2

Can you explain why everyone thinks we should use new tools to deploy agents instead of our existing infra? eg. I already run Kubernetes

I think there are some primitives for agents that need to be built out for better security and being able to reason about them. Agents run on infra, they have network connectivity, they have ACLs and permissions that let them read+write+execute on resources, they can interact with other agents. To manage them from both an infra and security perspective, we can use the existing underlying primitives, but it's also use…

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Re: Launch HN: Terminal Use (YC W26) – Vercel for filesystem-based agents

#23

Post by filipbalucha »

CharlesW wrote: post #8

> We built Terminal Use to make it easier to deploy agents that work in a sandboxed environment and need filesystems to do work. When I read this, I think of Fly.io's sprites.dev. Is that reasonable, or do you consider this product to be in a different space? If the latter, can you ELI5?

We overlap at the sandbox layer, but we're focused more on the layer above that: packaging agent code + deploying/versioning it, managing tasks over time, handling message persistence, and attaching durable workspaces to those tasks.

Re: Launch HN: Terminal Use (YC W26) – Vercel for filesystem-based agents

#25

Post by stavrosfil »

thesiti92 wrote: post #5

have you guys found any of the existing nfs tools helpful (archil, daytona volumes, ...) or did you have to roll your own? i guess i have the same question for checkpointing/retrying too. it feels like the market of tools is very up in the air right now.

Yep, this whole area still feels pretty unsettled. The thing we've become convinced of is that workspace state needs to be a first-class product primitive instead of something tied to one sandbox. That's why we model filesystems separately from tasks and focus on durable mount/sync semantics.

We're currently rolling our own but we've been meaning to experiment with other tools.

Re: Launch HN: Terminal Use (YC W26) – Vercel for filesystem-based agents

#26

Post by jsunderland323 »

adi4213 wrote: post #16

This is really interesting, congrats on the launch. The use case I’m trying to solve for is building a coding agent platform that reliably sets up our development stack well. Few questions! In my case, I’m trying to build a one-shot coding agent platform that nicely spins up a docker-in-docker Supabase environment, runs a NextJS app, and durably listens to CI and iterates. 1) Can I use this with my ChatGPT pro or Cla…

Hey I'm working on this problem (also a YC company but it's FOSS). It's a Dind approach https://coasts.dev/, I wonder if this works for your setup.

Re: Launch HN: Terminal Use (YC W26) – Vercel for filesystem-based agents

#27

Post by vivekraja »

adi4213 wrote: post #16

This is really interesting, congrats on the launch. The use case I’m trying to solve for is building a coding agent platform that reliably sets up our development stack well. Few questions! In my case, I’m trying to build a one-shot coding agent platform that nicely spins up a docker-in-docker Supabase environment, runs a NextJS app, and durably listens to CI and iterates. 1) Can I use this with my ChatGPT pro or Cla…

We don't support docker-in-docker yet, but that's something on our short term roadmap. We have the need for this ourselves! For now, you could call a different service to spin up your sandbox with the image of your codebase. Not ideal, but this is what we do now.

Yes, you can use your own subscriptions as long as you follow their guidelines

Re: Launch HN: Terminal Use (YC W26) – Vercel for filesystem-based agents

#28

Post by stavrosfil »

messh wrote: post #24

how does it compare to https://shellbox.dev ? (and others like exe.dev, sprites.dev, and blaxel.ai)

We're trying to be a bit more opinionated one layer up: deployable agent runtimes with first-class tasks, persistent /workspace, and rollout/ops primitives like versions, rollback, logs, and secrets.

For example we make it easy to have automatic deployments from your github ci (using our cli), and you can monitor and manage all your deployments in our platform, along with logs, conversation transcripts etc.

I'd think of us more of the deployment, monitoring and storage layer rather than just the compute runtime.

Re: Launch HN: Terminal Use (YC W26) – Vercel for filesystem-based agents

#29

Post by m11a »

rodchalski wrote: post #20

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K8s gives you orchestration of Docker containers. I don’t think it handles the container boundary any more than Docker does.

I don’t think it should be assumed to give network isolation, unless you’re also using extensions and something like Cilium for that purpose. I don’t think it’s the right primitive for agent sandboxes, or other kinds of agent infra.

(Obviously, you could still run a custom runtime inside k8s pods, or something like GCP’s k8s gVisor magic.)

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